Have you ever wanted to send a chat to one of your Sametime contacts who is not online or has an availability status of Do Not Disturb? Well, now you can with the new "offline messaging" capabilities of Sametime 8.5.2 Interim Feature Release 1.

If you have Sametime Advanced, you can double-click or right-click an offline contact or a contact whose status is set to Do Not Disturb to send them a chat. Or, you can continue an existing chat even when your chat partner goes offline or sets their status to Do Not Disturb.

When your chat partner logs on again or changes their status from Do Not Disturb, they see any messages sent to them while they were unavailable.

If someone sends you an offline message, you'll see an alert when you become available, just as you will with a regular chat. The offline messages show up in their own window, so they're easy to find. You can also open the offline message viewer anytime with the File>View Offline Messages menu. The offline messages viewer looks like this:

You can send offline messages to people who have older Sametime Connect,
browser, and mobile clients. Only people who have the 8.5.2 Interim Feature Release 1 client
can send messages as well as view them in the new offline messages viewer. (Other users will see offline messages in a standard chat window.)

Administrators must set the "Allow user to send offline messages" policy to turn on this feature.

In my posting yesterday, I told you about how you can send multiple files or even an entire folder to a chat partner. Today I'll talk about another great enhancement to file transfer in Sametime 8.5.2 Interim Feature Release 1: sending a file to everyone in a multi-person chat session, simultaneously.

In your mulit-person chat, you will now see a file attach button, which you can use to send a file to everyone in the chat. You can see the progress of the file transfer as it is sent to each person in the chat:

If you have someone in the chat who is still using an older client, you'll see a separate chat window open so you can easily send the file to that person, as well.

Although you can send only one file at a time, if you need to send multiple files, you can click the file attach icon to send another file, in another tab.

There are several new policy settings to administer the new file transfer features:

I was just listening to Gabby Davis do a great job explaining all things Sametime on the "This Week in Lotus" podcast, when the question was asked... "What is an IFR / Interim Feature Release?". This has come up in a couple of different venues, so I thought I'd explain. And no, we don't just sit around thinking up new acronyms to confuse all of you. :-)

As you can imagine, an organization the size of IBM Software Group has a handful of rules about what can go in a given release. New functionality can go into "major" releases (ie: 8.5.2) but not into "minor" ones, fix packs or the like. Major releases also have very specific, intentionally onerous and time consuming testing requirements. By calling it 8.5.3, we wouldn't have been able to ship until next year.

The IFR mechanism, while not commonly used by ICS, is regularly employed in other Software Group divisions. Through it, we could deliver new capabilities as a bolt-on to the existing release and limit our testing to the just new components. While a mouthful to say, 8.5.2 IFR 1 probably shaved 6 months off our ship date. I'm oversimplifying and IFR's are intentionally difficult to get approved... but we thought there was some really good functionality here and we wanted to get it to you as quickly as possible.

Hello - I am the Sametime end-user Help writer and in the upcoming days I will be posting information about some of the great new features that are
available in our latest release, Sametime 8.5.2 Interim Feature Release 1.

The
first thing I'm going to tell you about is our file transfer
enhancements for sending files to a chat partner. If you have Sametime Advanced, you can now do so much more than transfer a single file!

From an open chat window with a single chat partner, send multiple files or an entire folder to a single user, as follows:

Right-click a contact, or select a single
contact and then select Tools > Send, and choose either File or Folder. If you choose File, you can select any number of files to send. Or choose Folder and send an entire folder.

You see these same choices from an open chat window:

The file transfer information shows you the name of the current file being sent, and the total number and size of files you are sending. When sending files, you see a link for each file sent. For folders, you see the folder name only, and can open the folder directly from the chat transcript.

If you're viewing the files in chat history, you'll see when individual files and entire folders were sent.